The No. 1 issue in America today is the crisis at the border with some 10 million illegal immigrants crossing into the nation since President Joe Biden reversed President Donald Trump’s border security policies on day one.
In a speech that ran 67 minutes, a little short by modern standards and six minutes shorter than his speech last year, Biden touched on border security for all of five-and-a-half minutes some 40 minutes into the program.
We got a strong hint that Biden would underplay the border crisis he engineered in the White House’s posting of three key excerpts on its site in the hours before the speech. The summary was marqueed by abortion, followed by falsely claiming credit for COVID-19 recovery (never mentioning the lust with which Democrats and their teachers’ union allies promoted the job-killing and soul-crushing lockdowns), and ending with Trump’s a DANGER TO DEMOCRACY(!!!) while ol’ Joe is the epitome of “freedom and democracy.” The White House even put up a helpful online tool for the self-delusional cadres to share their seal claps to the speech in real time with preloaded enthusiastic emojis.
There was not a word about America’s top issue in the preview.
But you would think that the architect of this planned chaos, this deliberate border breakdown, might want to assure the American people that he understands our concerns. That he has a plan to check the criminals and suspected terrorists crossing our border; to prevent illegal aliens with no IDs but notice to appear paperwork boarding our commercial jets for 2 a.m. flights to the interior; and that 10 million people won’t eventually fraudulently claim asylum while being plied with $100 billion in public assistance, take jobs from Americans and legal immigrants, and eventually vote in our elections.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Biden might have something reassuring to say about the 20,000 mostly military age males from Communist China who have crossed the southern border in the past five months. Four years ago, these people would have been carefully interviewed and vetted, but now they are just waved through after being brought to the border by a Chinese organized crime syndicate with the reassuring name of “Snakeheads.”
But clearly, Biden’s staff wants the flood of illegals to continue (and maybe Biden too, in his fading moments of lucidity)—though, if possible, just a little less obviously. That’s why the Biden administration in 2022 started flying 320,000 illegal immigrants direct to a city near you with nothing more than a cellphone app as screening.
But if you wished Biden would prioritize border security and out-of-control illegal immigration in what most of America hopes will be his penultimate State of the Union address, your wish was denied.
What you got instead was Biden pushing for a dead border bill, citing its support by the Chamber of Commerce. And as he did, it was notable that his cadence became uncertain and choppy—with a higher quotient of slurred words, a break from his “Hey you kids, get off my lawn” yell for most of the speech.
The other section of the speech where Biden was off his game came near the end when he spoke about Hamas’ Stone Age war on Israel. On the former, Biden is out of touch with the American people; on the latter, he’s out of step with the emerging core of the Democratic Party.
In Biden’s call to pass the border bill—performative, given D.C. reality—he conveniently ignored the fact that Trump had the border under control and Biden undid it all, no bill required.
Biden stuck to his scripted talking points and claimed that he would fix the border if Republicans would pass the Senate Border Act. He wants you to ignore the fact that he created the border crisis by signing 94 executive orders in his first 100 days that together removed barriers to illegal immigration and restarted catch and release.
President Biden could make meaningful border security improvements today by simply rescinding his prior executive orders.
And for the record, the Senate bill had a couple of helpful provisions, but contrary to Bidens assertions, it would not secure the border. The bill actually cemented catch and release into law for specific classes of aliens, and it did not fix vulnerabilities created by the Flores agreement which has put children at an increased risk of trafficking. If that was not enough, the bill set a new minimum bar of 1,400 illegal aliens being allowed entry into the U.S. through ports of entry each day! Oh, and the emergency authority to close the border only took effect after more than 5,000 illegal aliens were arrested every day for a week, and the authority sunsets in three years while all the other provisions that allow more illegal immigration remain forever.
One last point about the Senate bill, assuming the Border Patrol could hire 1,500 more officers and agents (they’re having difficulty hiring now), Biden’s policies have added a million more illegal aliens at official ports of entry using tools like the CBP One app. This extra traffic requires at least 500 officers to process.
Adding insult to injury, Biden concluded his remarks by saying that America is “…home to people from every place on Earth… …we all come from somewhere, but we’re all Americans,” rhetorically erasing the distinction between legal and illegal immigrant, native born and naturalized citizen. This was Biden’s boldest lie of the night. It also provided a clear window into the Democrats’ view of American citizenship or even simple residency, that, in Biden’s words, it’s a birthright of everyone in the world to come here and “chase dreams that are impossible anywhere but here in America.”
Rodney Scott was Chief of the Border Patrol from 2020 to 2021 and is Distinguished Senior Fellow for Border Security at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He served in the California State Assembly and is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Retired Reserve. He’s the author of “Crisis of the House Never United.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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